The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East

© 2016 by Bill T. Arnold and Brent A. Strawn

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2016

Ebook corrections 10.27.2016, 05.17.2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-0574-9

Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture translations labeled AT are those of the author.

Walter Burkert (1931–2015)

in memoriam

Contents

Cover    i

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

List of Illustrations    ix

Preface    xiii

Introduction    xv

Bill T. Arnold and Brent A. Strawn

List of Contributors    xix

Abbreviations    xxi

1. The Amorites    1

Daniel E. Fleming

2. Assyria and the Assyrians    31

Christopher B. Hays with Peter Machinist

3. Babylonia and the Babylonians    107

David S. Vanderhooft

4. Ugarit and the Ugaritians    139

Mark S. Smith

5. Egypt and the Egyptians    169

Joel M. LeMon

6. The Hittites and the Hurrians    197

Billie Jean Collins

7. Aram and the Arameans    229

K. Lawson Younger Jr.

8. Phoenicia and the Phoenicians    267

Christopher A. Rollston

9. Transjordan: The Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites    309

Joel S. Burnett

10. Philistia and the Philistines    353

Carl S. Ehrlich

11. Persia and the Persians    379

Pierre Briant

12. Arabia and the Arabians    417

David F. Graf

13. Greece and the Greeks    467

Walter Burkert†

Index of Authors    501

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources    511

Index of Subjects    519

Back Cover    532

Illustrations

Map: The Ancient Near East xxvii

2.1 Map: The Assyrian Empire 38

2.2 Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III 46

2.3 Statue of Assurnasirpal II 78

2.4 Relief of a dying lion 79

2.5 The Balawat Gates 80

2.6 Judean archer on black stone seal 81

2.7 Assyrian archers on Lachish relief 81

3.1 Map: Babylonia 108

3.2 Shitti-Marduk kudurru image 116

3.3 Sun-God Tablet 123

3.4 Mushhushu dragon on the Ishtar Gate 129

3.5 Site map of Babylon 130

4.1 Site map of Ugarit 140

4.2 Merenptah Stela 142

4.3 Ruins of ancient Ugarit 144

4.4 Bronze figurine of Baal found at Ras Shamra 152

4.5 Baal with thunderbolt 158

5.1 Map: Egypt 170

5.2 Table: Periods of Egyptian History 171

5.3 Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and three daughters beneath the Aten 176

5.4 Relief from the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III 181

5.5 Bronze statuette of Taharqo 186

5.6 Ivory plaque from Megiddo 192

5.7 Ivory inlay of Isis and Nephthys 193

5.8 Tomb painting from Abd el-Qurna 194

5.9 Judean lmlk seals 195

6.1 Map: Anatolia 198

6.2 Plan of the Hittite capital at Hattusa 199

6.3 Table: The Kings of the Hittites 200–201

6.4 Relief of Tudhaliya IV 212

6.5 Section of Suppiluliuma II’s Südburg inscription 214

6.6 Reliefs on the rock outcropping at Yazılıkaya 219

7.1 Map: The Aramean kingdoms 237

7.2 Relief of Assurnasirpal II 247

7.3 Tell Dan Stela 250

7.4 Katumuwa Inscription 258

7.5 Hadad Statue 260

8.1 Map: Phoenicia 269

8.2 Table: Correspondence of West Semitic Consonants 281

8.3 Table: Qal Perfect and Imperfect 284

8.4 Azarba‘al Inscription 285

8.5 Ahiram Sarcophagus Inscription 286

8.6 Yehimilk Inscription 287

8.7 Shipitba‘al Inscription 289

8.8 Nora Inscription 293

8.9 The Kition Bowl 294

9.1 Map: Transjordan 310

9.2 Excavation of Iron I compound at Tall Abu Kharaz 314

9.3 Table: Kings of Iron Age Transjordan Appearing in Epigraphic Texts 321

9.4 Remains of Iron II fortress at Lahun 324

9.5 Fortification wall of copper-processing center at Khirbat en-Nahas 332

9.6 Iron II remains at Umm al-Biyara 334

9.7 Karak Inscription fragment 341

9.8 Basalt statue of an Ammonite king 344

9.9 Terra-cotta bull statue from Khirbat Ataruz 349

10.1 Map: The Philistine plain 354

10.2 Ekron Inscription 372

10.3 Tell eṣ-Ṣafi 374

11.1 Map: The Achaemenid Empire 380

11.2 Audience relief at Persepolis 384

11.3 Behistun relief 385

11.4 Cyrus’s tomb 386

11.5 Irrigation canal in the gardens of Pasargadae 388

11.6 Plan of Susa 389

11.7 Plan of Persepolis 390

11.8 Elamite delegation on the tribute reliefs at Persepolis 391

11.9 Ostracon of the hunt 396

11.10 Two subject peoples on the statue of Darius 400

11.11 Saqqara stela 404

11.12 Audience scene from Daskyleion 406

11.13 Persian king on painted beam from Tatarlı 408

11.14 Meydancıkkale reliefs 409

11.15 Taymā’ rider 410

12.1 Map: Arabia 418

12.2 Al-Jawf, the fortress of Qasr Mārid at Dumah 435

12.3 Palace of Qasr al-Hamra at Taymā’ 440

12.4 Taymanite text from the Mahaijah region 443

12.5 Mantar Bani ‘Atiya 445

12.6 Close-up of Mantar Bani ‘Atiya 446

12.7 Dedan 448

12.8 The necropolis at Khurayba in Dedan 449

13.1 Map: Greece 468

13.2 Bronze tympanon from Ida 480

13.3 Piraeus Apollo bronze 485

13.4 Alexander the Great 494

Preface

We wish to express our gratitude to our academic institutions, Asbury Theological Seminary and the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, for being places that make time for scholarly work, including the important but often behind-the-scenes work of editing. We lift up for special recognition the gifted assistance of Henry Huberty, who did preliminary screening of each essay and offered invaluable comments, and also thank T. Collin Cornell, who was instrumental in getting the project finished.

Jim Kinney and the good people of Baker Academic have been helpful throughout the project. As anyone who has edited knows, editorial work, especially on a complicated project like this one, can be a protracted affair, and not without its fair share of difficulties. Our labors have been gratifying nevertheless, not least because we have long schemed about a joint project that would allow us to work together more regularly. Jim and his team at Baker provided us with exactly such a project and eased our labor in key ways, making the entire venture that much better. Among many other things, we thank Baker for funding the work of Stephen Germany, who translated Professor Briant’s essay on Persia and the Persians.

Our deepest gratitude goes to our stellar roster of contributors. It is not always easy to get a project like this off the ground; it is even harder to bring it to completion. We thank the contributors who were on time with their contributions for their punctuality and for their extreme patience while we waited for those that arrived later. We are also thankful to colleagues who stepped in at later stages to fill in some missing pieces or even to pen essays that were originally assigned to someone else but, for whatever reason, could not be completed. We thank each of our contributors for their patience (often strained), good humor, and most of all for their excellent work. The volume’s delays are no doubt due in part to the fact that the contributors are world-class scholars, each with multiple projects and very busy professional lives. Despite a few unfortunate interruptions in the production schedule, we believe the volume is much better for the wait—we hope that the authors themselves and all who read their work will agree.

A final word: one of our contributors, the eminent classicist Walter Burkert, died as the volume was about to go to press. It seemed only right to dedicate the volume to his memory given all that he did to help us better understand the ancient world, including that around the Old Testament.

Bill T. Arnold

Lexington, KY

Brent A. Strawn

Atlanta, GA

Introduction

Bill T. Arnold and Brent A. Strawn

Perhaps second only to What do you do (for a living)?, the question Where are you from? must be the most frequent inquiry when people meet for the first time. When two people are becoming acquainted, the request to learn someone’s hometown or homeland reflects the belief that such knowledge is not only interesting information—a conversation starter, for instance—but also somehow fundamental. The point of origin is reckoned to be determinative, illustrative, even explanatory for who a person is now, in this particular moment of social exchange. Most of us assume as much, even if, and quite apart from the fact that, the person in question may be from a very different place presently or at least be a quite different person than the one they were whenever they hailed from wherever they hailed from originally.

This question of origin—where one is from—can be asked not only of people, of course, but of other subjects, including texts and, in the case of the book before you, even the Bible itself, or, still more specifically for present purposes, the Old Testament. In no small way the thirteen essays gathered here tell the story of where the Old Testament is from. They do that, however, in an oblique way. The essays deal with the world surrounding the Old Testament, whence comes the volume’s name: The World around the Old Testament (WAOT). Included here, then, are essays on the main regions and cultural groups that lived around ancient Israel, which gave us the Old Testament. Such books have been produced before, with volumes like Peoples of Old Testament Times and Peoples of the Old Testament World serving in their day as classic textbooks.1 Like those books, the present volume has essays on regions and groups from parts north, south, east, and west of ancient Israel/Palestine. If anything, we hope that WAOT is even more helpful in including some topics that have not always been included in works of this kind—specifically Arabia and Greece. The contributors and editors have done their best to make WAOT as up-to-date as possible and at the same time user-friendly so as to maximize its utility whether in a classroom or a reading room.

Two further brief points of introduction are in order—one concerns the structure of what is found in WAOT, and the other concerns what will not be found here.

1. As indicated already by its title, WAOT is not primarily about ancient Israel/Palestine or the Old Testament proper, so the essays are not overly oriented toward possible contacts with either. This caveat duly entered, each essay pays particular attention to that period (or those periods) that are most important for or pertinent to biblical studies. Within each essay, the reader may expect to find information on four important foci: (1) a general overview of the history and culture of the region or people group in view in that chapter; (2) special attention to ancient Near Eastern history from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Persian Period (ca. 1550–332 BCE) as the time frame most apposite to Israelite literature and history; (3) a discussion of important items beyond political history proper, including religion, the arts, literature, and the like; and (4) remarks about the relevance of the region or people group for ancient Israel and/or the Old Testament. To be sure, these four foci are not always laid out by number in precisely this order, but we have been at pains to make sure that each focus is addressed in a way suitable to the topic of each essay included in WAOT. In this way, each chapter is a study of its primary subject matter—first and foremost in its own right—but is also not naïve about the importance of these areas and groups for the study of the Old Testament proper.

2. What the reader will not find in WAOT is a separate chapter on Canaan and the Canaanites. Although it is possible to make a case that such an essay should be included here, we believe that WAOT can proceed without it if only because—quite apart from the deeply vexed question of the Canaanite origins of ancient Israel—the land of Canaan is where the Israelites lived and so, technically, is not around the Old Testament but the place where Israel was from, though the essays gathered here show how it is not only from Canaan; it is also, if not equally, from other parts—those parts around the Old Testament.

This brings us full circle to where we started. Where are you from? is the question we often ask of new acquaintances. Well, I’m originally from such-and-such, they reply, but I now live in such-and-such. Where a person begins, initially, originally—where they are from—may be important, but it is rarely the last word. So also with the Old Testament. It is from somewhere—or rather, "somewheres" (plural)—the places and regions that surround(ed) it and that are discussed in WAOT, but it is equally true that the Old Testament now lives most of its days elsewhere and so it may be a different thing than it once was. Indeed, it does not seem to be stretching things too far to say that the history of biblical interpretation is in many ways the story of the Old Testament (and the New) moving to different places—many of which are far removed from the ancient Near East and the ancient Mediterranean. As the Bible traveled these miles and millennia, it has come to mean and come to be many different things. This is a crucial point and quite true, but it is equally true that points of origin remain seminal. Our standard, go-to question with new acquaintances reveals that origins are not only important, they are also, sometimes at least, definitive, determinative, or otherwise explanatory. And so, despite the many different places where the Old Testament now resides, and despite what it has come to be and to mean as a result, we still think that where it originally hailed from is of vital importance, not only for back then, initially or formerly, but also for here and now. In the end, then, we hope the essays in this volume shed significant light on where the Old Testament is from and also (and as a result) what it is, even for today.

1. D. J. Wiseman, ed., Peoples of Old Testament Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Alfred J. Hoerth, Gerald L. Mattingly, and Edwin M. Yamauchi, eds., Peoples of the Old Testament World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

Contributors

Pierre Briant

Collège de France

Walter Burkert†

University of Zurich

Joel S. Burnett

Baylor University

Billie Jean Collins

Emory University

Carl S. Ehrlich

York University

Daniel E. Fleming

New York University

David F. Graf

University of Miami

Christopher B. Hays

Fuller Theological Seminary

Joel M. LeMon

Emory University

Peter Machinist

Harvard University

Christopher A. Rollston

George Washington University

Mark S. Smith

Princeton Theological Seminary

David S. Vanderhooft

Boston College

K. Lawson Younger Jr.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Abbreviations

General

Sigla of Texts, Tablets, and Other Objects

Books, Journals, and Series

The Ancient Near East [© Baker Publishing Group]

1

The Amorites

Daniel E. Fleming

According to the Bible, Israel’s origins had to be explained at two different levels: as a people established in their own land by Moses and Joshua, and as a family reaching back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In both cases, the Bible presents Israel as outsiders. Their forebears were not among the original inhabitants of the southern Levant, where they would later be established as ancient Israel. Abraham and company had to move south from Haran and before that from Babylonian Ur. Israel as a mass entered the land from the desert after living in Egypt for generations.

A tradition fixed on the notion of Israel’s foreignness to their own land naturally raises questions of who was replaced and how. The land as a whole would come to be called Canaan (e.g., Gen. 12:5), but the various stories of origin make reference to the prior inhabitants by various names. Israel is not portrayed as displacing a single entity, whether as a kingdom or as a people with one identity. Rather, the landscape consisted of many freestanding domains, often associated with town centers, as in the list of defeated kings in Joshua 12. For the biblical writers, these local political identities were embedded in larger group identities that were not in themselves political. Yahweh’s promise to Moses of a land flowing with milk and honey is defined by a list of such populations: Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Exod. 3:8). Even the Philistines, whom Israel encounters as a perennial enemy in the time of Saul and David, are regarded as another such population, ruled by five lords from separate town centers (1 Sam. 6:17).

These prior populations of Israel’s land represent a fascinating collection of disparate names, some completely unknown outside the Bible and others familiar but with ancient associations that leave them seeming out of place in the Bible. For example, the Hittites are known first of all from their late second-millennium kingdom based in Anatolia, and even their early first-millennium namesakes are found in the northern reaches of Syria once controlled by the older kingdom.1 Canaan and the Canaanites at least belong to the lands that the Bible defines as Israelite, though the terminology comes likewise from the late second millennium.2 Among the names from lists such as the one in Exodus 3, the Amorites more resemble the Hittites—familiar yet out of place. Like the Canaanites and the Hittites, the Amorites belong first of all to the Bronze Age of the third and second millennia BCE, and their presence in the Bible represents some kind of survival from a much older identity. Also like the Hittites, the Amorites belonged first of all to lands far north of Israel in Syria and beyond, so that the presence of the name so far south is surprising and intriguing.

The significance of the Amorites for readers of the Bible, however, goes beyond their inclusion among the peoples supplanted by Israel. Historians of the larger Near East have grappled for generations with this category from early Mesopotamian cuneiform, where the rulers of the last Sumerian kingdom, which was based at Ur, somehow identified them as a key enemy.3 In downstream Mesopotamia, now southeastern Iraq, this Sumerian fear of Amorite attack was followed by the actual defeat of Ur (ca. 2000 BCE) and the realignment of regional power in less centralized terms. Most local rulers in the succeeding period bore names from a Semitic type not familiar to the region’s own Akkadian language, and these names suggested continuity with western Semitic dialects. If the Amorites were western from a Sumerian perspective, the non-Akkadian names could be considered Amorite and regarded as evidence of a major social shift, reflecting a new Amorite age. Archives from the early second millennium could be treated as evidence for this Amorite world, whether in Babylon’s domain in south-central Iraq or in the rich royal correspondence from Mari, upstream.4

Meanwhile, the transformations of the social landscape across Syria and Mesopotamia coincided roughly with changes in the Levant, including the southern regions later occupied by Israel and Judah. As biblical scholars sought a background for Genesis and historians weighed the possible usefulness of biblical lore for understanding Israelite origins, the Amorites of the north offered a potential framework. If large-scale migrations of Amorites led to a complete recasting of power in Syria and Mesopotamia, the same populations and pattern could account for the rise of new cities and societies in the Middle Bronze Age Levant. Abraham’s journey from Ur to Haran to the land of Canaan (Gen. 11:31) could be understood as a narrative reflection of this historical reality. This application of a northern and Mesopotamian phenomenon to the Levant would also explain how the Amorite name came to be included in the biblical lists of prior peoples. The whole package placed the Amorites on the map of essential peoples of interest for the world around the Bible.5

Today, almost every component of the above reconstruction has been challenged or reinterpreted. The fall of Ur and the establishment of new powers in the next period indeed represented a shift toward regions upstream, but the peoples called Amorites were no western intruders and had long contributed to the Near Eastern landscape of peoples, east and west. Both Mesopotamian and Levantine social shifts involved many factors, with local changes as important as factors of distance and little evidence for migratory waves of true outsiders in either region. The biblical texts and traditions involving Amorites are often dated much later than once imagined, sometimes after the demise of Judah in 586 BCE, so that the biblical name stands at an even greater distance from the Mesopotamian groups.6

In spite of all these obstacles, there is still an argument to be made for the relevance of Mesopotamia’s Amorites for the emergence of Israel in lands far to the south. Mesopotamia’s Amorites were mobile pastoralists, not best understood as nomads but as communities identified by their reliance on herds of sheep and goats that were pastured over great distances. These herding populations were deeply integrated with settled people as part of a single social fabric that was maintained especially with bonds defined by kinship rather than by place. Whether or not any of the particular groups linked to Mesopotamia and Syria in the early second millennium were involved with changes in the Levant, the Bible’s portrait of Israel’s tribal organization and mobile herding background suggests continuity with the same social patterns. In order to understand the deeper origins of Israel, so far as they involve more than just the reordering of settled populations in the southern Levant, as well as the origins of the Arameans in Syria, we do well to look behind both groups to this older phenomenon. Between the term Amorite (Sumerian mar-tu), which goes back to the third millennium, and the peoples of Israel and Aram stand the ʿapiru, another type that reflects the same broader pattern of mobile and settled populations integrated into whole social fabrics. It seems that the biblical Amorites must derive their name ultimately from the ancient northern category, and however this label was carried across time and space, it is likely that it was borne by people who shared this pattern of mobile herding community joined to permanent settlement.7

1. Who Were the Amorites?

Who were the Amorites? There is no single answer to this question. At the same time, the diversity of possible answers shows that the category cannot be constrained to a single historical moment—that is, the disruption of Sumerian dominance in southeastern Mesopotamia under the rulers of Ur, and the concurrent social changes in regions far to the west that accompanied the transition between the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The Amorites appear to have been a class of people defined by mode of life, not by regional origin, and any application of the term to geography, politics, or language would have been secondary to this social usage. In particular, they were shepherds, or communities identified with the herding of flocks over distance.

The Amorites of Third-Millennium Mesopotamia

The starting point for understanding the Amorites in Mesopotamia has been their identification in texts from the Third Dynasty of Ur during the last century and more of the third millennium.8 For the rulers of Ur, the last bastion of Sumerian power and cultural dominance, the Amorites were outsiders twice over: their name was associated with highlands apart from the Mesopotamian valleys, and they could be denigrated as primitives.9 The western orientation of some Amorite references was often taken as universal, so that the term’s primary meaning could be considered as the direction, as west. At least this is how the evidence looked in early analysis. Moreover, Ur fought people whom it identified as Amorite during the later stages of its hegemony, and an Amorite wall was built to stave off attacks from the north. When the succeeding period saw the emergence of new centers at Isin and Larsa in the old Sumerian territory but under leaders with non-Akkadian Semitic names and novel, perhaps tribal, backgrounds, an Amorite conquest was the logical explanation.

With the accumulation of further evidence and ongoing reevaluation, however, the picture of the Amorites has shifted and remains open to discussion. One Amorite land may be found south of the Euphrates in central Syria, possibly including the Jebel Bishri.10 Yet the principal Amorite enemies of Shu-Sin, the second to last king of Ur, were the Tidnum, who came from the country east of the Tigris. Further, the repeated references to livestock from an Amorite land in the records from Puzrish-Dagan (Drehem) have likewise been linked to origins at least partly on the Iranian flank of Mesopotamia. For all the likelihood that the royal correspondence of Ur does not represent actual letters involving its kings, these literary works also envision an eastern highland home for the Amorites.11 Even if some Amorites could be connected with the Jebel Bishri and the west, substantial elements had nothing to do with this geographical limitation, and the pattern suggests a different primary meaning for the category. The notion of Amorites as outsiders to Ur and their characterization as uncivilized seem to reflect particular conditions from that realm, during which some circles clung to a narrowly defined Sumerian cultural heritage, with the alternative depicted in starkly unattractive terms. Sumerian identity was idealized by celebrating the city-based achievements of the region at the expense of long-standing social traditions of integration between urban and rural sectors, settled and mobile modes of life, and agricultural and pastoralist subsistence. One factor in this opposition of Sumerian and Amorite identities may have been the attempt by Shulgi of Ur (2094–2047 BCE) to dominate the pastoralist populations and economy of the highlands between the Tigris River and the Zagros Mountains, northeast of Sumer.12

The oldest references to Amorites come from Shuruppak (Fara) in the Sumerian heartland, where they were not isolated as foreigners. In lists that generally identify individuals by town, Amorite seems to offer a provenance for people who cannot be labeled by fixed residence.13 While the precise intent may elude us, it is likely that the early term represents a type, not a named people. Given the consistent association of Amorites with herding livestock and the products derived from them, the primary identity appears to assume participation in mobile pastoralism, which does not exclude settled residence. For those who understand Martu to mean Western, perhaps with a specific western region of origin somewhere in Syria, even these earliest references to the Amorites in Sumer must derive from the geographical sense of the word. The reverse offers a more plausible scenario, however, especially since the Amorites persist in inhabiting lands both east and west of the Sumerian center. Because the Syrian steppe provided a major setting for grazing sheep and goats during the third millennium, this region west (or northwest) of Sumer would have been one home for people of Amorite type. Just as the far-western land of Amurrum took its name in the early second millennium from the Amorite category and cannot provide an origin for all the Amorites of eastern Mesopotamia, other such Amorite lands would have been named for the mobile herdsmen found there.14

The implications of this conclusion are straightforward. The Amorites were not a people in any ethnic or political sense. They lived throughout Syria and Mesopotamia, and their relationship to cities and farmers must be deduced from the details of written evidence, from a sense of regional society grounded in excavation and survey, and from consideration of the social and political frameworks most compelling for the mix of settled agriculture and long-distance pastoralism attested for the ancient Near East. Especially in this last regard, Anne Porter proposes a social integration that challenges the common idea that nomads were outsiders to all society defined by settlement, so that, however these groups interacted, nomads could always be isolated as socially distinct. Instead, by social ties that transcended distance through kinship, mobile herding communities belong to the same peoples as their settled relations. As early participants in such a social fabric, the Amorites were not a separate people but one dimension of its mixed makeup—whether warp or weft.15

Use of Amurrû in the Mari Archives

Just as the term mar-tu has had to be reevaluated for its application to people who lived at the same time as the Sumerians of Ur and earlier, the Amorites of the early second millennium must be reconsidered. Even if the Amorites were first of all herding communities and the Sumerians of Ur were particularly concerned about Amorites in the lands upstream and thus to the west, the old Mesopotamian word cannot be universalized to describe all such herding peoples in every age and in every place. If it is the Amorites specifically whom we wish to understand, then we must discipline our study by the use of the word amurrû and acknowledge the ever-evolving social landscape and social terminology that came to identify similar populations by different words and logic.

Just as the Amorites of the late third millennium could be found across Mesopotamia and Syria, not confined to lands west of Sumer, the tribal peoples who came to new prominence in the period after Ur were also present throughout the region. It is often observed that the new centers of power in downstream Mesopotamia display both non-Akkadian Semitic royal names and hints of tribal backgrounds not defined by the cities ruled by these new kings. This is true of Isin, Larsa, Uruk, Eshnunna, and Babylon, as well as of cities further north and west.16 All of these southeastern domains, however, fell within the immediate sphere of the prior kingdom of Ur, and they were influenced powerfully by Sumerian ideals and their written expressions, especially as developed under Ur’s hegemony. For a sense of the world outside this Ur-focused realm, it is useful to consider evidence from other lands. During this period, cuneiform was used broadly by scribes trained in the downstream Mesopotamian tradition, and archives have been found as far away as Kanesh in central Anatolia, where the city of Ashur had established a trading colony.17 Perhaps more than any other written evidence, the massive archives of Mari provide a picture of society and politics that spans east and west.18 Mari itself stands just inside the modern Syrian border with Iraq, on the north side of the Euphrates River below where the Habur River empties into it. From this vantage, the kings of Mari kept contacts with and negotiated their political survival among other powers from Babylon and Eshnunna in the east to Yamhad and Qatna in the west.

A number of Mari specialists have undertaken to explain the varied use of the word amurrû in this material. There is a polity called Amurrum, just as mid-third-millennium Ebla identified a land near the Jebel Bishri with the Martu label, yet the two locations are not the same: Amurrum in the Mari archives seems to have been further west. Dominique Charpin links the whole origin of the Amorites to this land, which he considers to have extended from the mountains east of Ugarit all the way to the Jebel Bishri.19 Jean-Marie Durand likewise associates the name itself with the far west, as derived from the root mrr, to be bitter, with reference to the salt water of the Mediterranean.20 Beyond the western land, the word amurrû can also describe an Amorite language, and it can identify people in the realm of Mari’s own kings, in a sweeping generalization that somehow indicates a population type that crosses the lines of kingdoms or tribes. The uses for language and population are most simply understood as related, with the one defined in terms of the other.

First of all, the western polity of Amurrum takes its name from the older population type; this is surely not the homeland of a migratory wave that overturned the power of Ur. One letter associates the Binu Yamina tribal coalition with three western realms, each defined by the term mātum, which is reserved for polities ruled by one or more kings (šarrum). These are the lands of Yamhad, Qatna, and Amurrum, the first two dominating the lowlands that flank the inland slopes of the Lebanese and western Syrian mountains:

While the land of Yamhad, the land of Qatna, and the land of Amurrum are the range(?) of the Binu Yamina—and in each of those lands the Binu Yamina have their fill of barley and pasture their flocks—from the start(?), the range(?) of the Hana has been Ida-Maraṣ.21

One clue to the location of Amurrum may be found in a new reading for an early second-millennium (Old Babylonian) extract of the Gilgamesh Epic, where Andrew George identifies the home of Huwawa as where the Amurrû lives, west of Ebla.22 Other evidence from Mari confirms the far-western location of this realm. One brief missive confirms the writer has accounted for messengers from Hazor and messengers from four Amurrû kings. This group is to join the king of Qatna’s own messenger, who will escort them to that city.23 Another letter reports that various men have arrived at Mari from points far west: two from Hazor, two from Qatna, and three Amurrû singers. Such terminology may indicate their language, yet the geography matches the previous example.24

The most obvious location for the land of Amurrum is that known for Amurru in the Late Bronze Age, during the second half of the second millennium. According to evidence from el-Amarna, Ugarit, and Hatti, Amurru was based in the mountains between the Mediterranean coast and the Orontes River valley.25 In the Amarna letters dispatched by Rib-Hadda, ruler of Gubla (or, Byblos), the ruler of the Amurru peoples alternately importunes and assaults the coastal cities one by one until Gubla itself is in play. This attack on the coast presumes a highland center for Amurru as such. When Amurru passes from the domination of Abdi-Ashirta to Aziru, this later leader writes repeatedly about the opposite frontier, to the north and east. Amurru faces threats from Hatti through the Orontes realm of Nuhashhe. Later, after Aziru definitively abandons Egypt for alliance with Hatti, Amurru makes a treaty with Ugarit, as a separate coastal power to its northwest. Some portion of the Mari texts that have been associated with generic or ethnic Amorites may in fact pertain to the specific land of Amurrum. When Nur-Sin writes to his master Zimri-Lim, the last king of Mari in the mid-eighteenth century, about Amurrû figs in a delivery from the region of Yamhad, these may come from the western mountain land.26 Such labels are also applied, however, to wool, to livestock, and even to a woman included in a delivery to the Mari palace, and we must be prepared for different points of reference in different contexts.

As a whole, the Amurrû identity is not common in texts from Mari. The land of Amurrum was far away and contacts were rare. The word could be applied with more local considerations, but this did not occur often. This pattern in itself means something. So far as the word Amurrû defined some category of interest to the circle of Zimri-Lim and his people, it was not relevant to the everyday experience of the supporters and servants who constantly reported back to the palace. What then is the basis for Amurrû identity?

One significant factor appears to be language, involving both the consciousness of a linguistic distinction capable of separate classification and the choice to identify that distinct language category as Amorite. One remarkable text boasts a scribe who is said to understand Akkadian and Subarian—evidently Hurrian—along with Amorite.27 In another letter, Samsi-Addu, king of upper Mesopotamia, complains that his son Yasmah-Addu has requested a capable Sumerian scribe who can speak Amorite. Jack Sasson translates:

You have written me about sending you a man competent in Sumerian, Take for me [. . .] a man competent in Sumerian but speaks Amorite. Who is the person competent in Sumerian and lives here? Please, am I to send you Šu-Ea who is competent in Sumerian? Šu-Ea and [. . .]; Iškur-zikalama is competent in Sumerian; but he holds an administrative post. Must he leave his post and run to you? Nanna-palil is competent in Sumerian; but I have to send him to Qabra. You have written me, [My father] should send me a man from Rapiqum who is competent in Sumerian. There is no one here competent in Sumerian in [. . .]!28

Such exists but is a valuable commodity, not available for posting to Mari at the drop of a hat. These references to language involve a self-conscious classification that does not follow simple political lines, and the speaking populations cannot be assumed isolated to fully separate living groups. By this date, and in this context, Sumerian was essential to scribal practice, and while it may still have been associated with the region downstream from Babylon, it reflected no particular political body. Subarian evokes the allied kings of Shubartum, probably east of the Tigris, but the separate language must be distinct from the other broad types, perhaps as Hurrian, another category that crosses political lines. This leaves two clearly Semitic types, Akkadû and Amurrû. From a scribal point of view, these need not have represented comparable categories, in that Amorite seems not to have been written with cuneiform, so that from a modern view, we have no way to identify it securely. Nevertheless, Akkadian and Amorite are identified as distinguishable types, each with a coherent if overlapping speaking community.

At this point, the identification of language returns us to the issue of populations. During the centuries after Ur’s end, none of these language names followed political lines. Sumer was recalled as the fountainhead of Mesopotamian civilization, but the language was no longer in common use, and there was no single polity called Sumer.29 Akkad was once the urban center of a major kingdom launched by Sargon and associated with Naram-Sin, before the rise of Ur. This city gave its name to the language, and Sumer and Akkad together could be regarded as a merism for the territory of southern Iraq later ruled by Hammurabi and his descendants. Sumerian represents a totally different language class from the eastern Semitic Akkadian, and the two languages had clearly defined uses among scribes of the early second millennium, regardless of the political implications in the territorial claim. The question is what was meant by the distinction of Akkadian from Amorite, which was not part of scribal use with cuneiform.

Like Sumer and Akkad in royal inscriptions from the early second millennium, Amorite also defined people and speech by a category from the distant past. Across both Babylonia and the Mari region, where both Semitic language types would have been in use, Akkadian and Amorite also labeled masses of people in broad terms that transcended political bounds. One Mari letter reports a treaty between several groups in the Jebel Sinjar and eastern Habur regions and an Akkadian power, which the sender admits could be either Eshnunna, a major power east of the Tigris River, or Babylon.30 In his treaty with the king of Eshnunna, a copy of which was found at Mari, Zimri-Lim guarantees the loyalty to Eshnunna of any force he sends in support, whether it is identified with Mari, with its Hana people, with the Suhûm land long disputed between the two kingdoms, with any individual leader, or with any Amorite or Akkadian group.31 We know from a badly damaged Mari letter that Zimri-Lim is once said to be king of the Akkadian and the Amorite equally.32 Similarly, the Edict of Ammi-ṣaduqa, a slightly later ruler of Babylon, assumes the same breakdown of population types within his domain as defining the full range of citizens who merit equal treatment under the king’s declaration of debt cancellation.33

Given that the earlier Amorites were herding peoples, this population offers a natural point of reference for the usage after the fall of Ur. With their intense interest in herding groups and their tribal organizations, the Mari archives present a wealth of evidence for just the people in question. In general, Mari suggests that the Amorite category had gone out of common use by this date. It could be applied to the language and to sweeping distinctions between peoples or even cultures associated with language, but specific herding groups were identified most often by their mobility through the term Hana or nomad, possibly as people who camp in tents. Zimri-Lim, the king under whom most of these archives were collected, even calls himself "king of Mari and the Hana people (māt Hana)."34 Most of the ubiquitous uses of the word Hana in the Mari correspondence take for granted that these are Zimri-Lim’s own tribespeople, the Binu Sim’al, who are thus identified by their mobile herding component.

One letter to Zimri-Lim from the district governor based at the Mari center sets up a duality that resembles the Akkadian/Amorite pair. Bahdi-Lim exhorts the king to respond carefully after consolidation of his rule over a part of his realm that includes an Akkadian population:

[My lord] must honor the head of his kingship. [Just as] you are the king of the Hana, [so] you are secondly the king of the Akkadian. [My lord] must not (therefore) ride a horse. My lord must (rather) ride [on] a litter and mules, if he is to honor the head of his kingship.35

In spite of efforts to isolate which of these modes of transportation is specifically Akkadian or Hana, the main point seems to be that the horse is not an appropriate royal mount for ceremonial occasions. What is striking for this discussion is the definition of Zimri-Lim as king of two broad populations, identified by Akkadian and a second term. In both this text and the reference to the king of the Akkadian and the Amorite (above), Zimri-Lim is characterized as ruling two broad groups, one of which is Akkadian. This is the only such identification of what Zimri-Lim rules by Akkadian and Hana. Based on the occurrence of the Akkadian/Amorite combination in the Eshnunna treaty and the Babylonian royal edict, the Amorite element appears to be standard to such pairing. Bahdi-Lim’s use of Hana seems then to take the place of Amorite for Zimri-Lim’s particular kingdom based at Mari.

If the pairing of Akkadian and Hana does indeed match that of Akkadian and Amorite, this may strengthen the association of the word amurrû with mobile pastoralists in the post-Ur period. As Hana, these are not isolated from the core settled population, whether as a distinct ethnic group or as separate nomads. Most often, Zimri-Lim’s Hana are his tribal kinsmen of the Binu Sim’al, fully integrated into the leadership of the kingdom, and the primary military force on which he relies. The Binu Sim’al occupy many towns and villages in the Mari kingdom, and it is impossible to disentangle the nomadic population from the social fabric of the settled tribespeople. While the Hana of Bahdi-Lim’s schema represent Zimri-Lim’s own people by name, the Amorites—ruled as one element of the Akkadian and Amorite pair in the Eshnunna treaty—would identify the same pastoralist type by a category in wider use. As with Zimri-Lim’s Hana, the Amurrû need not be restricted to mobile herdsmen only, for they could equally include whole populations that incorporate a significant mobile herding component.

As a language designation, then, the Amurrû category is particularly intriguing. In the eyes of certain scribes, at least, groups with such a mobile component are characterized by use of a language or set of dialects that could be considered separate from Akkadian. In the kingdom of Zimri-Lim, not only was Akkadian the language of formal correspondence, but the name could also identify distinct communities that could supply a coherent fighting force. Both these and the Amorite groups somehow represented definable speaking groups, if the treaty labels align with the language types.

As I understand the evidence, the identification of certain speakers with an Amorite language is bound up with the distinction of an Amorite component to the population, both set against what is Akkadian. I prefer not to treat this distinction as ethnic, a term laden with overtones of separation amidst inequalities of power that will only confuse our interpretation of early Mesopotamia. By my approach, both Ebla’s Martu-land and the later land of Amurrum take their names from the identification of Amurrû populations, and neither provides a geographical origin for the Amorites, as if these were a single group migrating from the west. If the Amorite category in Old Babylonian evidence indicates peoples with a mobile pastoralist component, this use may preserve the original intent of the word Martu from the third millennium, before the distractions of Ur and its famous collapse.

The Bible’s Amorites

One way to divide the biblical geography of Israel’s neighborhood is between the landscape of kingdoms and the world before Israel. During the era of the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah were situated among a clearly delineated map of neighbors. One version of this map is on display in the opening salvo of the book of Amos: Ammon, Moab, and Edom in the east; Damascus representing Aram to the northeast; the Philistines on the southern coast, with Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron; and Tyre for the Phoenicians on the northern coast. According to this political geography, the territories of Israel and Judah are fixed and inviolate, lacking any overlap with the lands of their rivals. The Amorites are nowhere to be found in this landscape—nor are the Canaanites and the Hittites, known from early written evidence outside of the Bible; nor are the Jebusites, Perizzites, and so on, who belong more particularly to the Bible’s picture of populations that preceded Israel in the land.

According to the Bible, the world before Israel likewise had external neighbors, though some of these are also recognized as new, sharing ancestry with Israel through the family of Abraham. In the land itself, however, were found a jumble of town centers and populations that formed no single political entity. Recurrent lists of peoples define the specific targets for acquisition of the promised land, first announced to Abraham as a long list of ten in Genesis 15:19–21, given a shorter, classic form to Moses from the burning bush in Exodus 3:8: the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The same list of six peoples describes the successful conquest in Joshua 12:8, and these texts represent just a selection from an oft-repeated trope.

In the finished biblical schema, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and others from these lists remained part of Israel’s population landscape through the initiation of monarchy, when David is credited with completing the conquest begun under Moses and Joshua. Judges 1 recounts a series of failures, individual settlements, and territories still held by the Canaanites (vv. 27–33) or the Amorites (vv. 34–36). After the establishment of the kingdom and its consolidation under David and Solomon, David’s son is said to have made slaves of all the remaining people identified by such listed names, in this case the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (1 Kings 9:20; cf. 2 Chron. 8:7). This reference under Solomon is the last time that the biblical narratives bother with such a list of prior inhabitants. Once we reach the period of two kingdoms, the issue of such peoples is relegated to the distant past, the time when the ancestors of Israel and Judah still had to prove their ability to take and hold this land.

Within this tradition of displaced populations, the Amorites have more than one particular role, reflecting interest in their specific place among these disparate groups. One set of texts linked the land east of the Jordan with the Amorites, and especially the territory available for Israelite possession. In Deuteronomy 2–3 the kingdoms of Edom, Moab, and Ammon are treated as belonging to these peoples (though not yet ruled by kings) before Israel’s arrival, and only the land belonging to Sihon the Amorite and Og of Bashan (e.g., 2:24; 3:1) can be seized and occupied by Israel. Elsewhere, both Sihon and Og are treated as Amorite kings (Deut. 3:8; 4:47; 31:4; Josh. 2:10; 9:10; 24:12), and this eastern land is identified with Sihon and the Amorites (e.g., Num. 21:31; Josh. 24:8; Judg. 10:8; 11:21). It is also possible for the western highlands to be considered generically Amorite; Joshua undertakes his first regional campaign against five Amorite kings who rule cities that define the south: Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon (Josh. 10:5, 12). Also in the book of Amos, the writer recounts how Yahweh brought the people out of the land of Egypt so that Israel could take possession of the land of the Amorite, which in this context must at least include the west (Amos 2:9–10).

Rarely, the Bible includes the Amorites in schemes that propose regional distinctions between pre-Israelite peoples. Numbers 13:29 locates the Amalekites in the southern Negev wilderness, the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites in the (western) highlands, and the Canaanites by the sea and in the Jordan River valley. Yahweh’s first instructions to enter the land in Deuteronomy 1:6–8 separate the Amorite highlands from various other regions, including the shore of the sea, the Canaanite land, which suggests a similar division. When these two texts are set beside the tradition of the Amorite east and Joshua’s southern highland victory, it appears that the Bible’s Amorites are specifically linked to high country once frequented by pastoralists, like the land of Amurru in northern Syria and other Amorite lands in Mesopotamia. Without reference to the biblical pattern, Porter suggests that the apparently contradictory locations of Amorite lands in cuneiform evidence reflect the fact that these were not originally political entities at all, even if they came to be such.36 They were simply local manifestations of pastoralist territory that could be found in various highland and steppe settings. Remarkably, the biblical inclination to associate Amorites with high country would align with the same pattern, even if the logic of such naming was long forgotten. Nevertheless, it seems that the identification of Amorites with highlands and Canaanites with lowlands is no coincidence, and this is best explained by some actual survival of the term’s usage in connection with highland populations rather than lowland ones, most simply in such regions or among such peoples themselves.